Can a third party system or application directly access Legal Evolve's databases?

The databases used by Legal Evolve, for both Documents and Accounting are SQL server databases. You have full access to the SQL server database. In order to extract accurate data from the database, one would need to navigate the relationships between tables together with design knowledge of how data is stored.

We don't provide documentation on the database's internal structure, nor do we offer training. We will at times change the internal database structure to improve efficiency of the software, or to add new features, but will not be able to communicate all of these changes from our development team to you.

There are no password or encryption protection that prevents you from accessing the SQL server databases that Legal Evolve sits on - they're hosted on an instance of SQL Server Express on the law firm's server. You may freely access this database through ODBC, or OLEDB, and a variety of other industry standard protocols capable of communicating with Microsoft SQL Server. However, if any changes were made to the database, schema or data, we will no longer be able to offer support as we cannot be confident about the data integrity and compatibility with our software.

For reasons stated above, we recommend against *modifying* data through direct database interaction. Reading data from the databases is considered a safe operation however, and may be a suitable technique for you to develop custom reports. We are always working on more powerful built-in capabilities to allow you to write custom reports, and have plans to leverage Microsoft SQL Server Analysis services to allow you to to create pivot tables and work with analysis cubes.